The Investment Dresser: classic watches

None of the teenagers I know wears watches. My girl in the hot pants tells me they're too expensive: £30 for a decent one! I'm not going to shock her by telling her how much it really costs. Let her keep her innocence a while longer.

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Why don't you ask for a watch for your birthday, I enquire, remembering the excitement when my sisters and I used to unwrap the boxes from H Samuel. 'Er, hello? We'd rather receive iPhones. And they've got clocks.

'Faced with such implacable logic, you can but feel two things: old - and pleased to be old. I love watches, the way a man's large dial makes a woman's wrist look delicate or how an antique dress watch shows up all other bracelets at night. I enjoy feeling undressed when I leave my watch off. How can you truly enjoy the liberation from time constraints on holiday if you never wear a watch?

I don't have a vast watch collection - that's for men who don't have many outlets for their magpie instincts. There's a neon plastic ToyWatch, good when you're in down-town mugger's ville, and a 1930s Asprey marcasite one with a romantic history, for which I paid too much and which I have never got to work properly. I took it to Asprey on Bond Street once - its repair department is a lovely, tranquil, breathe-in-the-deep-pile-carpet sort of place - but it wouldn't touch it because 'in the 1930s, Asprey licensed out its watch production and we're not familiar with this movement'. Memo to self: beware watches belonging to Argentine aristocrats and other antique hokum.

Scarred, I eventually got the Hermès watch I'd always wanted. Or wanted since it first launched in 1991 - and really, really wanted since Martin Margiela tweaked the strap and made it distinctively, inexplicably long: the femininity of a strap that wraps round your wrist twice. The Cape Cod is an oblong classic, with art-deco-y numerals. It's classic, classic, classic, as a watch that costs that much (£1,800 and up) should be. It works with everything. Literally. Unlike the antique one, it accurately tells the time. And that strap? It really is classic with a twist.